Turing when he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society
Alan Turing was a mathematician and logician born in England in 1912. He is now considered to be the founder of computer science and invented the idea of artificial intelligence as we know it, as well as formalizing the concept of computation. However, he was arrested in 1952 after the discovery of his sexual relations with another man, as homosexuality was still illegal in England. Turing committed suicide two years later.
The Life Of Alan Turing
His parents lived in India because of his father's involvement in the Indian Civil Service. Turing and his brother stayed in England with friends and relatives until his father retired in 1926.
He studied math at Cambridge University and taught there afterward, becoming involved in quantum mechanics.
There Turing developed the concept of the Turing machine, which states that a device cannot solve all mathematical problems.
Turing worked part time secretly for the British cryptanalytic department, the Government Code and Cypher School, and later moved to work at its headquarters, Bletchley Park, when World War II broke out. There he helped decipher messages encrypted by the German Enigma machine and lead a team in building a machine (called a bombe) that would decode the German messages.
He began to develop the idea of machine which would process information when the war was over. His ideas were dismissed by his colleagues at the National Physics Laboratory, even though his design probably would have won them the award they wanted, that for the first digital computer.
At Manchester University he directed the computing lab and developed work with would later show to be the basis of the field of artificial intelligence.
In 1951 Turing was elected to the Royal Society.
He was arrested for homosexuality in 1952 and agreed to undergo injections of oestroge in order to avoid prison. He was considered a security risk and could no longer decipher codes for the British Government.
Turing committed suicide by cyanide in 1951.
Fun Facts
A comic from the popular xkcd webcomic series.
The Turing Test (a test to determine machine intelligence) was mentioned in a xkcd comic.
2012 will be Alan Turing year, as it is one hundred years after the date of his birth. There will be celebrations taking place all over the world.
Alan Turning (June 23rd, 1912 - June 7th, 1954)
Alan Turing was a mathematician and logician born in England in 1912. He is now considered to be the founder of computer science and invented the idea of artificial intelligence as we know it, as well as formalizing the concept of computation. However, he was arrested in 1952 after the discovery of his sexual relations with another man, as homosexuality was still illegal in England. Turing committed suicide two years later.
The Life Of Alan Turing
Fun Facts
Links
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/alan_turinghttp://www.turing.org.uk/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/
__http://listverse.com/2009/02/24/top-10-most-influential-scientists/__